We hate to repeat ourselves these days and we just wrote about the poster. So, getting down to it… “Cold Souls” is the feature-length debut of French-born filmmaker Sophie Barthes (who grew up in the Middle East and in South America ) and sounds like a meta, Charlie Kaufman-like mindbender that stars Paul Giamatti, David Strathairn, Lauren Ambrose and Emily Watson.
The film has been compared to Charlie Kaufman more times than anyone cares to count (most of all the filmmaker, we’re sure), and the sprightly score by Dickon Hinchliffe (“Forty Shades of Blue,” “Married Life”) in this trailer does not help to dissuade those connections. It certainly doesn’t help that Paul Giamatti plays as existentially woed Paul Giamatti in the film in what appears to be a”quirky”-looking comedy about a man who tries to lose his soul (via a Cold Souls Storage facility — sounds very ‘Malkovich’ and then has to travel to Russia to get it back. We’re not convinced by the look of the trailer that this film is saying anything new in the “surrealist, quirky, mindbender” genre (ugh), but people we trust (including Karina at Spoutblog) seemed to enjoy it, and it gained good word of mouth earlier this year, so we’re willing to give it a shot. But there’s nothing worse than a retread of a unique voice. We’ll be seeing it soon.
The film was a minor sensation at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and comes out in limited release (starting New York and L.A.) on August 7.